George Boutwell's speech before 10,000 people at the Great War Meeting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on August 6, 1862, was clear about slavery having caused the Civil War and Black emancipation being the solution. Boutwell was the only speaker that day who explicitly called for an end to slavery, thus helping prepare public opinion for Abraham Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which the president issued on September 22, 1862, following the battle of Antietam.

In 1933, the pre-eminent Black historian, Benjamin Arthur Quarles, wrote his Master's Thesis on George Boutwell while at the University of Wisconsin. Quarles selected Boutwell as his topic after being told by his then thesis advisor that he shouldn't write about the Black experience in America because Black history was only a "marginal specialty." Quarles titled his thesis, "Boutwell: A Radical with Reasons," and singled out George Boutwell as a primary supporter of the Black cause during the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

George Boutwell hosted the Republican party’s Thomas Jefferson birthday dinner in Boston in April 1859 that helped propel Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Lincoln and the other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination didn’t attend, but Lincoln sent a letter of regret that soon became famous for expressing his conviction that “he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.”  Newspaper reports of Lincoln’s sentiments helped strengthen his standing in the Republican party one year prior to the party’s convention in Chicago.

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[Poster showing the invitation/menu for the 1859 Jefferson birthday; photos courtesy of the Omni Parker House Hotel, Boston]

George Boutwell and those who drafted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution wanted to prevent former Confederate political officials and military officers from being elected to the highest offices of the U.S. government, of winning through politics what they failed to achieve through armed rebellion. If the U.S. Supreme Court uses an "originalist" interpretation of Section 3 of the amendment, one that relies on the original understandings of Boutwell, Thaddeus Stevens, and other members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that drafted the amendment, then it may well rule that state courts like the one in Colorado do not have the authority to prevent Donald Trump from being on the 2024 ballot for President.

With thanks to the Curator's Office of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, my wife, Buthaina Shukri, and I were treated to a 90-minute tour of the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C. We saw the location of George Boutwell's ground floor office when he was Revenue Commissioner for Abraham Lincoln in 1862-1863, and his suite of offices in 1869-1873 as Treasury Secretary for Ulysses S. Grant.

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The tour helped us imagine George's workdays at Treasury, especially during the Civil War when Union troops were quartered both in the basement and in the courtyard. We also saw where George was working on March 23, 1871, when he received an urgent summons from Ulysses Grant, asking him to come immediately to the Executive Mansion and accompany the President to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to pass the KKK Act. Also known as the Third Enforcement Act, that statute is still in force today, outlawing interference with Members of Congress and other federal officials in carrying out the lawful execution of their duties, including certifying Presidential elections. 

Several years after removing its copy of the Emancipation Group statue showing Abraham Lincoln and a formerly enslaved Black man grasping broken chains, it's time for the city of Boston to come up with an imaginative solution to publicly show this important piece of American history. 

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[Emancipation Group statue formerly in Park Square, Boston; photo by Jesse Costa, WBUR.]

Chief Justice Salmon Chase leaked word of a pending Supreme Court decision on currency "greenbacks" to Treasury Secretary George Boutwell in 1870.

The  dynamics of maximizing Black voting power remain the same as they were on Great Emancipation Day in 1903 when George Boutwell and William Monroe Trotter, editor of Boston's Guardian newspaper, called for a New Emancipation Proclamation.

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(photo credit, Ebony Magazine)

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rejected the notion of a "colorblind" Constitution in citing the work of George Boutwell and the other framers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

As the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue, George Boutwell worked with Abraham Lincoln to fund the Union war effort in 1862; this column explains its relevance to current day efforts to modernize the Internal Revenue Service.

Read about the connection between George, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 2022 U.S. Open golf championship played at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Listen to Jeffrey discuss George Boutwell's relationship with fellow Massachusetts public figure Henry Wilson (U.S. Senator, Vice-President) on the podcast Henry Wilson & the Civil War. Podcast creator Lincoln Anniballi interviews Jeffrey in episodes five and six.

George S. Boutwell might have become president after the assassination of President James A. Garfield. One year earlier, Boutwell had been a major player at the Republican National Convention in Chicago and was the choice of some in the party to join Garfield on the ticket.  If he had, George Boutwell would have become the country's 21st President.    

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This article recommends that Boston's replica of Abraham Lincoln and a kneeling ex-slave holding broken chains be located with other exhibits of the city's Museum of African American History, such as a video/hologram of Frederick Douglass giving the original dedication speech and extracts from George Boutwell's Senate report on white supremacist violence in Mississippi in 1875.  

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 (photo credit, Stuart Cahill/Media News Group/Boston Herald)

Jeffrey discovered an 1890 editorial in George S. Boutwell's papers, entitled "An Unpardonable Insult," describing the ceremony at the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia.  More than 131 years later, we're still living with the consequences of memorials to the Lost Cause of southern white supremacy.

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 (photo credit, John McDonnell/Washington Post)

Ulysses Grant spent the night at the Groton home of George Boutwell, his Secretary of the Treasury, on June 16, 1869, shortly after they had attended the extravaganza National Peace Jubilee in Boston. It was during the summer of 1869 that Wall Street operators Big Jim Fisk and Jay Gould (pictured left) were planning to manipulate the gold market, which Grant and Boutwell foiled on Black Friday, September 24, when they released four million dollars of Treasury Department gold into the market.

George helped President Grant initiate the KKK Act of 1871, which sought to protect Black voting rights in the South and today is the basis for federal lawsuits against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and others for seeking to prevent Congress from carrying out its lawful duties in certifying the 2020 election. George and Ulysses took a famous carriage ride up Pennsylvania Avenue on March 23, 1871, that is helping protect American democracy 150 years later.

George Boutwell's remarkable political career from 1839 to 1905 was made possible when George moved at age 17 from the family farm in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, to take a job in a dry goods store and study law in nearby Groton in 1835. 

Jeffrey was interviewed on CBS Evening News in May 2015 about U.S.-Cuba projects he organized promoting ocean fisheries conservation involving two of Ernest Hemingway's grandsons, John and Patrick Hemingway, as well as American and Cuban marine biologists.

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(Pictured left to right are Jeffrey Boutwell, Master Angler Dr. Marty Arostegui, and John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest Hemingway)